Dark Souls 3 DLC ► 15 Secrets of Ariandel

See that ladder over there? That ladder motivated me to make this video because no one should have to go through what I did to find it. ‘Cause breaking the bridge doesn’t work, finding your one character with the Cat Ring to survive the fall doesn’t work but what does work is killing this crawling tree. Once it’s dead, you’ll hear an audio cue which signifies a ladder has spawned… And it’s easy to miss it because who would think to go back up here? At the top of Laddersmith Gilligan’s wet dream is a Titanite Slab, one of the three in the DLC. Another place that looks out of reach is the colosseum structure which looks an awful lot like the place we fought Priscilla in Dark Souls 1. It’s accessed after breaking an illusory wall in the lower part of the cave with the flies.

Once you navigate the roots down, you get led to an invasion by Livid Pyromancer Dunnel, provided you’ve used an ember and apparently every painted world has its pyromancer because the corpse you get the Parting Flame from is also the same one that gives you Jeremiah’s Robes in Dark Souls 1. It reads: “When Dunnel lost his hideous spouse, he gave his own pyromancy flame as an offering, which transformed into a parting flame. Not long after, Dunnel became a mad spirit, damned to wander the lands.” Once you’re done fighting Pyromancer Dunnel, just plunge down from the plank and hurry home. Don’t worry, it’s totally safe. The Parting Flame has a really interesting weapon art. You release your store of death echoes to gain a modest dose of Estus …or not. So to get this to trigger, you need to keep it in an active equip slot then build enough death echoes for you to cast it.

So this translates to killing about twelve enemies for one charge of Estus at a time. Let’s talk dialogue. This stuff is really interesting because the DLC adds a new way to trigger dialogue. You just have to return to a place or character for the second time after reloading the level. This is one example, the worst example. It’s a seemingly pointless event where you get to here from the Corvian down in his cave. Corvian: “My very own home, now…

(shuddering breath) Vaati: Far more interesting is this piece of dialogue that triggers the second time you approach the white haired woman after you’ve let her out of the archive attic. Painting Woman: “Those who aren’t ken to fire cannot paint a world. Those absorbed by fire, must not paint a world. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten, Mother…” Vaati: So, I’d say she fits the first line, right? She’s someone who isn’t ken to fire and cannot yet paint a world. Ariandel who’s the restorer of the Painted World, he fits the second line as he’s absorbed by fire and, perhaps, shouldn’t have painted the world? And as for the third line, it’s trying to get us to ask a question: who is the white haired girl’s mother? Is it the woman depicted in the statues, holding the small girl, perhaps? Or is it Priscilla? We’ll talk about that a bit later.

Maybe the mother is related to the girl’s Uncle Gael, as well. This man who prays to the… Gael: “…merciful goddess, mother of the Forlorn…” Vaati: But time will tell more about this character, hopefully. Especially considering how much of a tease her final piece of dialogue is. This triggers the second time you talk to her after killing the boss. Painting Woman: “My thanks, Ashen One. I can almost see the flame. Soon uncle Gael will bring me the pigment. I wonder if he has found it? The dark soul of man…” Vaati: It’s almost like Gael is still out there and that he’s looking for the dark soul of man, the girl wishes to paint upon her canvas. So we’ll have to go more into what this means in the lore video. But before we go, I just wanna say: do you think ‘pigment’ is a play on words for ‘pygmy’? The Furtive Pygmy was the one who found the Dark Soul which split into humanity, after all. Maybe I’m looking too far, though.

Number Eight. The crow-like Corvian also has final dialogue after you set fire to the Painting. Corvian: Ohhh, my, thank you. I can hear the crackling from here. The sound of my home, the painting of Ariandel, burning away… When the world rots, we set it afire. For the sake of the next world. It’s the one thing we do right, unlike those fools on the outside.

(laughing)” Vaati: So this tells us of the cyclical nature of the painting. This world that mirrors the outside, in a way. You also get a slab for your efforts here. So because the game was updated, my camera mods don’t really work well right now so it’s hard to get close up to some of these models but it’s worth talking about, what some things look like close up. They give us clues that we couldn’t glean from just dialogue and descriptions. So this white haired girl is the best example.

I might start calling her ‘Aria’, not the white haired girl and I call her Aria because the painters so far have been Ariamis and Ariandel so, presumably, her name would take after theirs as well. ‘White haired girl’ is just getting so annoying to say so. Aria. She has scales visible on her ankles and her neck and also her eyes are a dark red and slitted like a reptiles’. Priscilla of Ariamis shares these same sort of scales and the same sort of eyes, though hers are green. So considering this dialogue: Aria: “…I haven’t forgotten, Mother…” Vaati: It might be that Aria’s mother is Priscilla given the similar scales and the eyes and the hair. So Priscilla’s definitely a promising candidate but we’ll talk more about this in her lore video. So next, let’s talk about the environment in a bit of detail just like we did the models. So, in particular, I wanna talk about three things. There’s the snake statue at the end of the boss chamber, there’s the glass murals on the sides of Ariandel’s chamber before he destroys them and there’s the intertwined serpents upon the door of the church.

But first let’s talk about the snake statue because you come face to face with this thing immediately after the boss fight and it’s so deliberately placed and designed that they want you to ask questions about this thing. Your attention is inevitably drawn towards it. So it’s a statue because the face is textured like wood and the scales on the tail are torn and maybe rotting away, revealing that it’s actually cloth because you can see the thread between them. And since this cloth, these scales, are rotting away, you can actually see inside the tail which reveals that it’s actually metal or wood segments – cylindrical segments – held together by wiring of some sort. And I call it a tail but really, it’s more like her lower half. Hell, it’s more like her entire body. Her torso is scaled like the tail is and it’s not really like a hood because if the head piece hadn’t worn away at the front, we’d be calling this thing a snake, straight up.

We wouldn’t be calling it a human. It would be entirely covered. The shawl around this thing’s shoulders is like fur and it reminds me of Priscilla’s fur. So what is this thing and what does it represent? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can really claim to know for sure but I think it could be a representation of Priscilla but that’s a stretch and I think it also could be someone else entirely. And I got a lot of tweets about this statue but I didn’t get a single one about the glass murals on the panels during phase one of the boss fight. Look at this, it’s creepy. Two dark womanly figures lean over a valley between two darkly wooded cliffs. One of these women is resting upon a sword or a staff and the other one is reaching down to grasp a broken white chord. At the bottom, below, are the barely visible figures of people reaching up towards them like a lot of hollows do in the game when they pray. Why is no one talking about this? If I had to guess, I would say that maybe they’re the two other sisters of the Sable Church of Londor, Elfriede being the third.

The broken link could represent how the sisters are seeking to usurp the linking of the fire and the figures at the bottom could be hollows worshiping them. That’s the best theory I got but what are your thoughts? Lastly, engraved upon the door of the church are two snakes entwined. It reminds me of Kaathe and Frampt. Kaathe and Frampt represent two sides of a cycle. One light, one dark but both irreversibly intertwined and doomed to repeat.

So I’d say that’s what it’s meant to represent but I don’t know why it’s here in the Painted World. But that’s enough lore talk, let’s talk about something very insignificant which is the crabs. I killed them so you don’t have to. One drops a Crystal Gem. Wow. Number twelve. The wolf you fight on the way through the snow fields. So in case you ran past him and didn’t kill him, the wolf gives titanite if you defeat him in the snow field in both spots. Number thirteen, very interesting. If you chose the Lord of Hollows path and ending in the base game then Friede and Vilhelm, formerly of the Sable Church which is related to that ending, have heard of you and when you talk to them, they beseech you to return to your subjects, to your hollows, instead of remaining in their Painted World.

Friede: “Thou’rt the Lord of Londor, and have thine own subjects to guide.” Vaati: Yuria has something new to say as well. Yuria: “Thy scent seemeth most familiar. A sweet fragrance, long faded from our own bosoms. My lord, how this came to pass I know not, but… Take heed. Kindness can wear upon one’s principles…” Vaati: And she has more dialogue when you kill Elfriede. Yuria: “Twas the soul of my sister. Elfriede… A poor wench turned to Ash, who would abandon Londor… If thou wouldst, let it nourish thy Lordship. And in return, do her one small kindness. Remember those who stayed by her to the end, in the shadows cast by fire… And lastly, my Lord, take up thy rightful mantle, of usurper.” So for number fourteen, a couple of people on Reddit have pointed out a nice detail about the name ‘Elfriede’ and the change of the name to ‘Friede’.

So, as we know, Elfriede was a member of the Sable Church and both Yuria and Vilhelm refer to her by that name. But she renounced her past life and she found a new purpose in the painting. And here, in item descriptions and dialogue, she’s known as Sister Friede without the ‘El’ at the start. And both of these names have meanings that line up with who she was at each time in her life. So ‘Elfriede’, according to Wikipedia, means ‘elf strength’ and when she had that name, it’s at a point where strength was a much bigger part in her life. The three sisters of the Sable Church were known as very able swordmasters and they were known to be strong enough to found the Church just between the three of them. So ‘Elfriede’ means strength and ‘Friede’, however, is derived from a Germanic element ‘frid’ which means peace. And in the Painted World, described as a peaceful land, it makes sense that she would change her name to Friede. For she found a people to care for and even attempts to calmly reason with you to leave the painting. She doesn’t want to fight but she knows she’ll have to to keep the peace.

So From’s naming was really on point with this character. And finally for number fifteen: don’t kill any NPC in the Painted World. It’s really not worth it this time around. You don’t get any exciting weapons or anything like that. Vilhelm and Friede disappear, the crow-like Corvian drops nothing, Aria cannot die for she says she has a world to paint and Gael… Killing Gael, I think, locked my Soul Level 135 character out of the Painted World forever because I can’t get him to appear. I guess I’ll have to take this character to new game plus now which kinda sucks…

So thanks for watching guys. Hope you enjoy the Ariandel content to come and let me know if there’s something I missed down in the comments and go down in the comments and see if there’s anything cool down there that people have posted about. But thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time. .